The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. Additionally, previously used estimates of mutation rates which may have been too high by a factor of 2. This may push the “last common ancestor” of many human and human-related lineages back by a factor of 2 in terms of time.

There’s a new letter in Nature Genetics on de novo mutations in humans which is sending the headline writers in the press into a natural frenzy trying to “hook” the results into the X-Men franchise. I implicitly assume most people understand that they all have new genetic mutations specific and identifiable to them. The important issue in relation to “mutants” as commonly understood is that they have salient identifiable phenotypes, not that they have subtle genetic variants which are invisible to us. Another implicit aspect is that phenotypes are an accurate signal or representation of high underlying mutational load. In other words, if you can see that someone is weird in ...